Related papers: Learning Poisson Binomial Distributions
We give two results on PAC learning DNF formulas using membership queries in the challenging "distribution-free" learning framework, where learning algorithms must succeed for an arbitrary and unknown distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. (1) We…
We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…
Hypothesis Selection is a fundamental distribution learning problem where given a comparator-class $Q=\{q_1,\ldots, q_n\}$ of distributions, and a sampling access to an unknown target distribution $p$, the goal is to output a distribution…
We consider the problem of learning high dimensional polynomial transformations of Gaussians. Given samples of the form $p(x)$, where $x\sim N(0, \mathrm{Id}_r)$ is hidden and $p: \mathbb{R}^r \to \mathbb{R}^d$ is a function where every…
Consider the random quadratic form $T_n=\sum_{1 \leq u < v \leq n} a_{uv} X_u X_v$, where $((a_{uv}))_{1 \leq u, v \leq n}$ is a $\{0, 1\}$-valued symmetric matrix with zeros on the diagonal, and $X_1,$ $X_2, \ldots, X_n$ are i.i.d.…
The $k$th-nearest neighbor rule is arguably the simplest and most intuitively appealing nonparametric classification procedure. However, application of this method is inhibited by lack of knowledge about its properties, in particular, about…
Organisms and algorithms learn probability distributions from previous observations, either over evolutionary time or on the fly. In the absence of regularities, estimating the underlying distribution from data would require observing each…
The Poisson distribution is the probability distribution of the number of independent events in a given period of time. Although the Poisson distribution appears ubiquitously in various stochastic dynamics of gene expression, both as…
Polynomial regression is a basic primitive in learning and statistics. In its most basic form the goal is to fit a degree $d$ polynomial to a response variable $y$ in terms of an $n$-dimensional input vector $x$. This is extremely…
Mixtures of Gaussian (or normal) distributions arise in a variety of application areas. Many heuristics have been proposed for the task of finding the component Gaussians given samples from the mixture, such as the EM algorithm, a…
Statistical learning theory chiefly studies restricted hypothesis classes, particularly those with finite Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. The fundamental quantity of interest is the sample complexity: the number of samples required to…
We study the problem of learning junta distributions on $\{0, 1\}^n$, where a distribution is a $k$-junta if its probability mass function depends on a subset of at most $k$ variables. We make two main contributions: - We show that learning…
We present a fairly general framework for reducing $(\varepsilon, \delta)$ differentially private (DP) statistical estimation to its non-private counterpart. As the main application of this framework, we give a polynomial time and…
We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…
We study the problem of learning a distribution from samples, when the underlying distribution is a mixture of product distributions over discrete domains. This problem is motivated by several practical applications such as crowd-sourcing,…
We present novel, computationally efficient, and differentially private algorithms for two fundamental high-dimensional learning problems: learning a multivariate Gaussian and learning a product distribution over the Boolean hypercube in…
Given a dataset of $n$ i.i.d. samples from an unknown distribution $P$, we consider the problem of generating a sample from a distribution that is close to $P$ in total variation distance, under the constraint of differential privacy (DP).…
We revisit the problem of learning from untrusted batches introduced by Qiao and Valiant [QV17]. Recently, Jain and Orlitsky [JO19] gave a simple semidefinite programming approach based on the cut-norm that achieves essentially…
We study the learnability of sums of independent integer random variables given a bound on the size of the union of their supports. For $\mathcal{A} \subset \mathbf{Z}_{+}$, a sum of independent random variables with collective support…
When the historical data are limited, the conditional probabilities associated with the nodes of Bayesian networks are uncertain and can be empirically estimated. Second order estimation methods provide a framework for both estimating the…